The invention which is the subject of the present application is to provide a method and system which allows the user of the same to access information held in an organization's database in an effective and improved manner.
The ability of an organization's personnel to access and manipulate the data that they, their customers, suppliers and partners generate in the course of their activities is a prerequisite for organizational effectiveness.
The use of process driven technologies to allow this access and manipulation is known and recent advances allow data which is gathered and stored in several systems to be made available to the user within one coherent view, placing the retrieved information in a process context for the end user. For example, the invention described in the applicant's co-pending British Patent Application No. 0018839.1 describes a method for developing a process-driven system for displaying diverse information within the context of the processes that require that information.
Several products constitute a body of prior art for this invention but which present a set of problems that this invention addresses.
A first area of technology relates to systems which are embedded within others. Applets™ Add-ins provide access to functionality from one system within another through the installation of a target system within the host system. (for example the Java™ jar technology U.S. Pat. No. 6,349,408).
A second area of technology relates to mechanisms for interaction between software-based systems. A known technology in this area is remote procedure call—a well-established mechanism whereby two systems can interact and share information at the level of protocol for communication. A further technology is that of data exchange (eg Electronic Data Interchange (EDI), Extensible Markup Language (XML), translation wrappers for e.g. legacy system access, adapters) that allow systems to meaningfully exchange information according to translation or defined protocol at the level of information.
A further technology relates to an attempt to ensure interoperability of diverse systems, typically based on object technologies. This technology involves the creation of common defined interfaces and methods of working for software components, such that a common broker can manage the communication between these (e.g. the CORBA™ request broker).
A further technology relates to the creation of shared data structures for authorised components, or agents, to present information against, giving an interaction typically aimed at problem resolution of some form, with features to support dynamic reconfiguration (see for example U.S. Pat. No. 6,334,146)
A further technology relates to populated frameworks for interaction that provide basic components with pre-defined interaction capabilities to address particular problems, giving a network similar in principle to a special case of target systems as activators (see for example U.S. Pat. No. 6,308,314)
A further technology relates to the presentation of data in target systems within a host system, where the host system is a portal, and the target systems are generally exposed through a web service interface, wrapped in html presentation (see for example the products of Plumtree™ Software).
A yet further area of technology relates to the coordination and control of a collection of systems by a central workflow or process integration engine (see for example Microsoft Corporation's BizTalk™ product, or the ‘eBusiness Operating System’™ product of Asera Corporation), through the definition of a process comprising a series of steps with information flow. This technology is intended to provide for the coordination of several systems in the execution of a single process.